I really enjoyed this process of making this tattoo. Its pretty amazing getting to create bonds and friendships while tattooing and getting to learn about enique life goals and different paths people live and how each person has a very different story from the next. This tattoo took many sessions to complete and I think we both learned a lot through the process and over the time spent on it. 
Thank you Mike for getting this Buddha tattoo and many more since, I appreciate it very much. 

Tattooing and touring with the guys in Gym Class Heroes was a lot of fun over the years and I made a lot of rad tattoos and artwork for them as well.  This is a group of guys that I really enjoyed the friendships and memories that I made with each member in their own ways and
​really a great group of guys all around. 

I went on a lot of different tours with Gym Class Heroes over the years.  They invited me out to tattoo them on Warped Tour a few times, a few headlining tours, as well as them touring with other acts such as Lil Wayne, The Roots, The All-American Rejects, and more. Many great memories made.

Not only traveling with them on tour, but on their time off, they also travel to my studio to get tattoos.

The drummer of Gym Class Heroes collected one of my favorite tattoos I've done over the years. Especially considering the circumstances of beginning this tattoo while on the road backstage in a dressing room before a show.  This tattoo took many sessions and somewhere in the ballpark of about 20 hours or so.  Thank you Matt, miss you bud. 

Gym Class Heroes asked me to make a painting for them to use as a tour banner, I was pretty amazed to see something I made this large and on a  stage like this. 

There is so much more than just tattooing that I really appreciate about these experiences in life.  I get to make art that people see every day and hopefully get inspired by.  I also get to create friendships with people I truly admire and respect for their artwork as well.  Along the way I can only hope that I inspire my children and the people that I love to enjoy their lives as much as I do, because it goes by really really fast, and it doesn't get any easier as time goes on. 

This blog is a good opportunity for me to reminisce about the fun times I spent
traveling around the country with my friends.  I've been lucky enough to be
able to make tattoos every day while traveling around enjoying the excitement of
live music and meeting new people in a different city every night.
Certain moments of traveling have definitely been a lot easier than others though.  
​Early in my career I spent a lot of time traveling in a van as well as bus,
good and bad weather, good and bad shows to go along.
 Its a pretty amazing right of passage to look back at this point in my life.  

I spent a good bit of time and many tours with a group of really awesome guys that were in a band named Halifax.  I was pretty young around this time, to me just a kid from south Georgia having fun and enjoying the opportunity to be traveling around the country tattooing and hanging around some fun guys from California playing Pop Rock n Roll tunes for kids that were loving it.  We were all growing up together and really enjoying it.  

It's amazing to be able to watch a band grow, not only as artists, but more importantly as people.

It is more than just making a tattoo sometimes.

A few years after I began tattooing I also found myself taking advantage of some pretty unique opportunities to travel around the country with my friends and make some cool tattoos along the way.  I like to call it "Tattouring", mainly because most of the friends I have been traveling with play music and like to bring me along on their tours to tattoo them and their crew members and the other bands on the tour as well. It all began with my friends in a band named From First to Last, on their first big headlining tour, many years ago, and continued to snowball into a list of many bands that I now have the pleasure of calling my friends and take me out on their tours to make tattoos for them. 

"I never imagined myself to be in a place like this, tattouring wasn't a job I could sign up to have one day, it just happened and I've always been grateful when someone invites me to join them into their lives and into their homes on the road.  Thats a big deal to me because most of these guys don't trust very many people in their lives, and to be honest I haven't either. So it's cool that we find ways to connect and respect each other as both artists and as people."
​-Craig Beasley

The picture below is of myself tattooing the inner lip of Sonny Moore, the former singer for the band From First to Last, which I was on the road tattooing with for other members of the band.  
At the time of doing this tattoo, I remember asking Sonny what the meaning of the word was, 
his reply to me was, "I don't know, just a word I made up that I want to use one day." 
At the time I didn't think too much of it other than that I was happy to make his first tattoo for him.

It took me a long time to realize that people are the same, but yet so different.
In the moment of meeting someone for the first time,
you have no idea where that person has been and you have no idea where that person will go.  

​The word I tattooed that day in the back of the tour bus was "Skrillix"

I'm very grateful and honored to have spent many years traveling with these guys. I learned a lot and the friendships built with and through these guys are timeless.